Tod lives such an amazing life!

Ultimate power

A nice combo for sure

Like a medieval Ripley!

Day? You lead an interesting life if it's not best of month;).

I do hope so.........

And to motivate the servants if they are not fast enough.

I see it as exactly that

Father Tod

Luckily no cows were harmed in this video

I will happily watch Todd making traditional bowstrings. However there are several on UKposts, making bowstrings from hemp, sinew, nettle , gut or yucca. I didn't know but violin strings are still made from sheep gut. Their strength is quite amazing. Lots of people use bowstrings made of violin strings.

Most of the ones on his xbows look like rope... not deer gut?

Ill watch Tod do anything

HI Sergey, I actually use linen for mine which seems to be the most common.

A war bow is equivalent to an excalibur crossbow of the same draw weight. Because of the modern crossbow string. Which means the long bow or hand held would be like compound crossbow with modern strings. Of its own draw weight too.

There is no war Ba Sing Se

Came here for this!

Underrated comment

can't stand them, so I was not sad for the loss

Now we know what happened to the house of Savoy! 😅

I have thought of pretty much the same thing - would have been great. A crew served 6 man rowing bow using the galley slaves.

Little known fact that those weird crescent shaped arrowheads were actually meant for creating slaw.

Lmfao.

Yes, so cool, right

Thank you

​@@tods_workshopThank YOU boss. Happy wife with bollock dagger, happy life😊

Thanks and I am very pleased with them too - if I say so myself, very good value!

He does have a cool life doesn't he?

I must say I am privileged

Thank you for mentioning the Codex, I had no idea such thing existed. And there is even a website where you can browse all pages online (link is in the wikipedia article). It really shows how much of a genius Leonardo was. I'd love to see Todd recreate some of the machines/mechanisms from the Codex.

@@lazyman7505 Leonardo da vinci is overated!

@@lazyman7505 Leonardo davinci is overated!

Hi Vitor, Andreas Bichler made a fantastic repro of a similar bow, but I suspect they are simply not suited to heavy bows, so not likely to be military

@@tods_workshop I can't argue against you, after all you have years of experience in the field. But even if it's not worth it to build one, i think an episode commenting on the crossbow design would be interesting. I mean he can't be weaker than the Cho-ko-nu and other conventional bows.

Well you would barely use it past dagger range anyway. It's not for sniping.

@@gratefulguy4130Indeed, though it has to have range enough to be worth using - if you could just take one extra step and stab the guy you might as well do that. I'd suggest for a serious assassination type scenario its got to have enough accuracy and power out at the 5, 10 possibly even 15 meter range. So you can be far enough away to be largely obscured in the crowds/shadows or hit your target as you walk by the door to their office - a distance so what you are doing isn't massively telegraphed.

There was a larger screwjacked crossbow version according to Payne Gallwey, but I have found him to not be that reliable so I am not sure. I use a bought Acme thread and nut for this, so it it should be pretty good. I also have a film about that bow and whether it would be any good for assassins here ukposts.info/have/v-deo/kIiDenqbo6F226s.htmlsi=AfAIgrlHw1BrqOXh

@@tods_workshopNever heard of a larger screwjacked on at all myself, so that is intriguing. Though I am less interested in larger and more interested in adding power to the tiny footprint one - so it may actually become more than just a dangerous toy. Larger crossbow can be spanned in many other ways, so being screw pulled would be interesting, but I can't see the point - seems like it would always be a slower method to cycle a practical power crossbow. But practically powerful at the tiniest sizes so there is no real length for leverage this screw method should be plausible (at least with the really high quality of modern steel machine made screws).

I reckon a 25 lb bow and arrow would go through that cabbage, isn't momentum more important than joules?

I got another Idea. How large can you make a ballista. Never mind if it´s slow to reload. if what it sends away weighs a hundred pounds.

Also for small all-metal one. This thing already looks more like a gun then a crossbow, might as well give it some bullets.

the ballista could be configured for either bolts or shot. The mechanism is not the same for both.

Rest assured, they had that.

I can hear Joerg laughing now!

No, I was thinking the same thing. That math does not add up... One pr. minute would have seen them launch ~54,000 arrows over 6 hours.

They made a video about that siege, shooting arrows from a tower to see how much this affects distance. Yes, it's every hour, not minute.

Its harassment just to keep heads down

Wirklich? Ok. Muss ich schauen.

Yes it was rather. Last time I had to peg the frame down with massive posts so this was much easier

Thanks and I will look into that

In Australia Torsion weapons are not legally considered to be crossbows, also not really medieval

@@ArmouryTerrain Interesting.

No they are not, but I stretched the point - sorry. Regular bows are 'flexion artillery' whilst these are torsion. The vast majority of medieval (non explosive) artillery and missile weapons was flexion, but they did use torsion as well - look up 'spingald'

@@tods_workshop Gotcha, thanks!

That's what I was thinking. Do you still have to make bolts to some specific spine or can they just be completely rigid?

Yeah, I wasn't expecting them to bind like that

As made famous in a theatre show, where they had a bad day, the blank firing gun didn't work, the rubber sword fell apart the antagonist kicked the opposite number who proclaimed ' The boot was poisoned' and collapsed dramatically. The play was saved by an over acting savoy cabbage. .😅. PS supposedly West Side Story haha.

They do

All true, but the momentum of an arrow or bolt is very high compared to its energy and doesn't tumble so in fact a 45J bolt will pass through 50cm of sand and still be dangerous, but it will stop all of the above rounds. Different beasts

@@tods_workshop good point! I think what stood out to me was the difference in energy when going from a purely mechanical propellant to chemical propellants

Note that a reconstruction of a 15th-century horn crossbow spanned by a cranequin managed nearly 200 J at rather high velocity. It was made by Andreas Bichler. Yew warbows manage 100-150 J.

@@b.h.abbott-motley2427 yew long bows top out at around 130j for the monsters and Andreas’ horn sinew was 1200lbs from memory. But ye the performance was staggering; I also have a slight memory that it broke after a few shots so perhaps it was overdressed. Regardless he is a fabulous craftsman

@@tods_workshop The 150lb yew bow tested for *The Great Warbow* managed 146 J with a heavy arrow. A few historical yew warbows seem to have drawn at least 180lbs, so theoretically a well-made one with a heavy arrow could manage 175 J. Bichler's 1,200lb horn crossbows appears in multiple videos on here, so I don't think it broke. It did perform worse in the second test (168 J), because of how it was stored & the different weather conditions (mainly humidity has a negative effect, but also heat). So horn crossbows do have the disadvantage of changing with the weather & require care to keep them dry for best performance.

Here ukposts.info/have/v-deo/hZZof3moiIKomGw.htmlsi=-btTVXh7C6tH2BCE

@@tods_workshop Brilliant thanks

Dig back and I have a few videos on them. Basically this set up was unchanged from around 300AD to 1500AD and then more complex triggers started to come in and by 1650 what we would see as a modern trigger system was here. The main reason is to stop the full load of the bow transferring onto the trigger lever, so a couple more stages and you are there

Thanks for the thoughts and in fact I am planning to make one pretty much as you describe. They knew all about pulleys and what they did and they also knew about cams so in fact a cam style compound bow would have been entirely plausible however I am taking the view that IF they had made one it would likely have started simple rather than fully formed, so yes it is a very simple style I would go for. Watch this space.

@@tods_workshop Very exciting!!! And thanks for all your fantastic videos, I absolutely love what you do.

@@tods_workshop have you considered making a assasins bow with springs for most of string apart from the firing point, like a slingshot it would give u 3x the potential draw length and u could put the ratchet on a 90* angle with a flywheel instead of rod, would extend your draw length like 3x probably increase your power even more because the 'string' being a spring will cover retraction distance faster than a string ive been thinking of making a modern handcrossbow just with springs rather than bow arm and a firing tube slotted with so bolts cant flick back at me. still trying to decide between a windlass system with a freewheel lever that is never actualy disconnected from bowstrings or a set of gear teeth along the top of the barrel and a multi phase goats foot ratchet system with a series of locking points so u can pump load it like a air rifle and less friction than a permanently connected windlass

@@tods_workshop ive always wanted to put some pullys on a siah'd bow. further extend their already rediculously long string draw length to height ratio and the unflexing wood of siah is the natural choice to add a pully wheel to

Thanks and yes I have filmed the Fire Arrows film and it is just working through the edit

@@tods_workshop Fantastic, can't wait!

The catapulta was the family of three bows that were identical except for the size. They came in 1, 2 and 3 span versions (this is a 3 span) and the 'Scorpion' was the nick name for the 1 span version